Watching the movie with my 4- year-old daughter recently, I think I made it as far the Munchkins before 1 became hyperglycemic and collapsed on the floor.
My wife found me about an hour later, deep in a coma, when she came to investigate the fruity smell that had begun to permeate the house. She had to play "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Brazil" for seven days straight before she could revive me.
As it was, some smart aleck had switched the DVD for "Brazil" with "It's a Wonderful Life," and she nearly lost me.
The truth is, watching "The Wizard of Oz" doesn't have to be a nearly fatal experience for anyone.
The first thing to consider is the nature of villainy. It's easy to peg the Wicked Witch of the West for the villain because we've been brought up on a steady diet of antagonists who look evil.
Today's children are used to deformed dark lords like Voldemort and giant flaming catseyes like Sauron. The Wicked Witch of the West not only is green, she has a pointy hat and a broomstick, and she has a wicked cackle. Cruelest of all, in Baum's book, she threatens to make Dorothy do housework.
Pish-posh, I tell you. We should be so lucky to live in a world where evil has bad breath and can be identified so easily, or where the bad guy always has horns on his head. The world isn't that simple. Even the Devil himself, when he can't appear as an angel of light, usually can manage at least to look like a newspaper editor or the secretary of education.
If you look at the witch's motivation, she's actually very harmless. All she wants is the ruby slippers that belonged to her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, the poor woman who had the misfortune of standing where Dorothy's house landed.
That seems like a harmless enough request. If a house landed on my brother, I think the least someone could do would be to give me the shoes he was wearing at the time, as a keepsake.
(I might not be too keen on wearing them myself if they were ruby red, or even silver like the shoes in the book, but it doesn't seem likely the witches were called wicked because they had impeccable fashion sense.)
Be that as it may, the witch wants her sister's slippers. But for reasons not readily apparent, Glinda, who has been introduced as the Good Witch of the North, decides to put the slippers on Dorothy's feet.
It's important to note that there's no discussion here. Glinda doesn't ask Dorothy if she wants to wear the slippers. She doesn't even check to see if the colors will go well with what Dorothy is wearing. She just twinkles her magic wand, and voila! Dorothy is now wearing the ruby slippers of a dead woman.
In the process, she also receives the enmity of the Wicked Witch of the West, who is prepared to make Dorothy fold the laundry to get them back, if it comes to that.
Now you might think that since all Dorothy wants is to go home and that since Glinda is a good witch, she might be willing to give her a hand. But no, Glinda insists that the only person who can help Dorothy is the Wizard of Oz, the ruler of a far-off city.
So Dorothy has to trek all the way to Oz, picking up help as she goes from such unlikely sources as the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and Elton John. In the movie, she has the added travail of hair that can't decide how it's supposed to be done, with pigtails that change their length at regular intervals and frequently don't match.
When Dorothy finally does reach Oz, with the bad hair days and terrible songs now just painful memories, the wizard reveals that he has a longstanding grudge with the wicked witch himself and sends Dorothy to get the witch's broomstick.
It's during this point of the story that Dorothy is captured, and her friends muster the courage, compassion and musical talent no one ever knew they had to rescue her. They not only rescue her, they get the broom and kill the Wicked Witch of the West in the process.
By now, it should become increasingly clear why Glinda gave Dorothy the slippers. When she landed in Oz, Dorothy killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Now she and her friends have killed the Wicked Witch of the West Once they return to Oz, Toto the annoying yipyip dog reveals to everyone that "Great and Powerful Oz" is a con man who has been using his razzle-dazzle and flair for the theatrical to lord it over the superstitious residents of Oz. Disgraced, he leaves Oz in a balloon and is never seen again.
At this point, with two wicked witches dead and the wizard exposed as a charlatan, Dorothy unknowingly has created a tremendous power vacuum in the political and magical structure of Oz.
Who is left to fill that vacuum? Glinda, obviously. The Good Witch of the South is mentioned but never appears. One can only imagine how Glinda dispatched her other rival before dropping a house on the Wicked Witch of the East.
Dorothy, dupe that she is, laments that she has no way to go home. But the truth is that she could have gone home any time, as every fan of the story knows, by clicking her heels. That is exactly what she does, and she remains blissfully unaware of the horrors she has unleashed upon Oz.
With Dorothy now gone, we can only imagine how Glinda has enslaved the Munchkins, melted the Tin Man for spare parts, and sicced flying monkeys on any who dare to oppose her iron-fisted rule.
I've shared my vision for "The Wizard of Oz" with several friends and co-workers, and none of them has been able to find any holes in my thinking. Several have remarked that they never will be able to see the movie the same way again.
I hope you have a similar experience the next time a small child convinces you to pop the movie into the DVD player. If not, make sure you have a copy of "Brazil" handy
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